News Bulletins

The IIMS publishes a regular monthly electronic News Bulletin that carries up to date information about Head Office activities and initiatives as well as news, details about forthcoming and recent events and current affairs from around the international IIMS family.

A month in the world of COVID-19 sure is a long time. The pandemic continues to consume our thoughts on a regular basis, but there are signs that worldwide lockdowns are starting to open up slowly and members are reporting that surveying activity is starting again. Hurrah! Please, however, do not let yourself become complacent to the dangers of this awful disease as you work.

Working from home, the IIMS team has put their time to good use and the past few weeks have proved to be busy. The IIMS UAE Branch hosted over 400 delegates at their recent online seminar. New membership applications are reaching the office at a much higher rate than normal. The number of students joining the IIMS Professional Qualifications programme has soared. Our twenty third handy guide is published, an authoritative piece of writing by Capt Allen Brink entitled ‘What a marine surveyor needs to know about on-off hire condition and bunker surveys’. And today we have published the biggest ever Report Magazine at 112 pages!

We have all been kept busy and I am pleased to say that my CEO report for the Annual General Meeting on 16th June will be an upbeat one to reflect all this activity. The IIMS offices are reopening to staff from 1 June on a voluntary basis. Half the team plan to work from the office with the other half continuing to function from home for the time being.

These are tough times for marine surveyors – more challenging than most of us will ever have experienced in our lives. I do remain confident though that as we emerge from lockdown, marine surveyors will once again be in high demand. I’d like to thank those IIMS members who have joined us for the first of our online seminars in the past few weeks. They have been very well attended, beyond expectations. It is heart-warming to see many surveyors taking the ‘enforced career break’ to learn some new and refresh old skills.

Also, I’d like to extend my thanks to my colleagues at IIMS for their efforts this past month and for their unstinting support. Our combined teamworking has been the only reason we have managed to keep offering a full service to our members.

I recently updated the IIMS COVID-19 Safety Working Guide, which is published in full in this news bulletin. As countries around the world start to unlock their citizens, I remain very concerned at what this means given that the virus is still present in our communities. It requires us to keep social distancing and taking sensible precautions until a vaccine or suitable treatment exists.

Those of you who read my columns often will know I am rarely short of words or topics to write about; and I usually have an opinion on one marine subject or another. But with the pandemic engulfing us all now and overwhelming our lives, I have found the introduction to this month’s news bulletin almost impossible to write. What should I say? How should I phrase it? How to make IIMS seem relevant at a time when other things matter far more? Marine surveying suddenly seems irrelevant. So, I will be brief on this occasion.

We have made the inevitable decision to close the offices and work from home in recent days – effectively taken out of our hands. Working remotely does not mean that the IIMS team cannot serve our members and communities over the coming weeks during these abnormal times – even if you just want to chat, we’d be pleased to hear from you. Our distance learning Professional Qualifications for students continue without interruption as do all the other services we provide. Clearly, we have had to cancel all face to face conferences and seminars until much later this year, but we are rolling out a series of low-cost online seminars via Zoom to replace these covering a variety of topics.

February proved to be an interesting month with a lot of activity happening, much of which is reported in this bulletin. I would especially draw your attention to the short articles on misrepresentation by an accredited marine surveyor, what to do if the ICO comes knocking and the pitfalls of being an expert witness and getting it wrong – financially painful in this case! But more importantly, I would like to comment about the Institute’s policy on Coronavirus or COVID. The epidemic is a tragedy and has cost many lives already. IIMS is monitoring the situation closely and is assessing its activities on a case by case basis. The consensus is that the virus might peak by April, but that is not a given. So, we need to be careful as do you too, especially if you are travelling internationally. To those planning to attend courses in the coming period, we are advising not to travel if coming from a ‘high risk’ country. It is a worrying time and seeing the impact it is having on the dynamics of the wider marine sector is deeply concerning.